


Chrysalis

by stereolightning (phalaenopsis)



Series: The R/T Fics [10]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-11
Updated: 2014-07-11
Packaged: 2018-02-08 09:05:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1934997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phalaenopsis/pseuds/stereolightning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The road to reconciliation is paved with discomfort. Moments on the way back to together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chrysalis

Remus had slunk off to the champagne fountain to confer with Arthur, leaving Tonks alone at the edge of the wedding tent. Summer Burrow scents carried to her on the wind – wildflowers, dried corn scattered before chickens, motor oil from Sirius' motorbike hidden in the henhouse. Her sense of smell had already heightened. As she sipped her pumpkin juice, she could have sworn she could smell the pumpkins ripening in the sun before they were picked – round, orange, pregnant with seeds and pulp.

"Congratulations," said an airy voice from a yellow pillar in Tonks's peripheral vision.

Tonks turned. "Wotcher, Luna," she said.

Tonks remembered Luna from that night over a year ago at the Department of Mysteries, although they hadn't really spoken at length, since they were both fighting and both injured. Luna looked brilliant in her sunflower headpiece and saffron robes. Tonks made mental note of the colors, bookmarking them for later hair-color experiments. Now that she could metamorphose again, she was happily making her way through the color wheel.

Tonks held up her wedding ring, and its tiny diamond jittered with torchlight. "Ta very much."

"Oh, yes. It's good that you've married each other. But I meant the baby. I don't know you terribly well, but I do think you will be a very nice Mum. And Professor Lupin is good with children, isn't he? Everyone liked him at school, except Draco Malfoy, but Draco is a bit closed-minded. Do you know the sex yet?"

Tonks knit her brows a moment. Then she shook her head and smiled, realizing she had just made a very Remus-y face. "It's only just happened," said Tonks. "Did – did Remus tell you?"

Perhaps this was too much to hope for. He had seemed upset when she told him about the baby last night. But if he was telling people about it–

"No, it's just the way you're standing," said Luna. "You keep touching your stomach and smiling. Although I suppose a particularly friendly intestinal parasite might lead one to do the same."

Tonks snorted quietly into her pumpkin juice. When she lowered her glass, she said, "Thank you. You're the only other person who knows right now. I haven't even told my Mum."

"I'll keep it secret, if you'd like. People don't usually talk to me at parties, anyway," said Luna. She said this without an ounce of self-pity. Not in the lonely, stoic way Remus would have done, but in a truly detached, objective way. She was an odd bird, Luna, but her charm did sneak up on you.

"Thanks," said Tonks. "I was really impressed with you at the Ministry, by the way. You could be an Auror."

"Oh, no, I don't think so. Rotfang conspiracy, you know."

Tonks opened her mouth to reply, but the atmosphere in the tent shifted, and Tonks instinctively drew her wand. The canvas walls were bathed in silver-blue light, and Kingsley's lynx Patronus spoke with his slow, deep voice.

As the world broke apart around them, Tonks had one last glimpse of Luna Lovegood, striding calmly through the melee of Apparating bodies. Tables were knocked aside, and wine glasses shattered.

Tonks lost track of Remus in the fray.

.*.*.

The grass beyond the protective enchantments of Tonks' parents' cottage turned brown under oppressive August heat, like her hair last year, stripped of color and life. She half-expected a relapse, but her hair and features remained as plastic as they had been before he left.

She sat by the window and watched sunflowers open, die, and dump black seeds back into the earth. She sipped tea and thought of Remus, because she had always been more of a coffee person – Aurors being, as a rule, highly caffeinated at all times – but he had suckered her into drinking and eventually being fond of tea, and particularly to loose-leaf Chinese needle tea with its oddly musky, vegetal perfume. 

Meanwhile, she overheard her mother and father in the kitchen, discussing whether they might be able to smuggle him out of the country, or send him into hiding. Her mother was safe, of course, a pureblood, but Dad was not, so –

So they might be a household completely bereft of fathers, soon.

With the Ministry now truly a nest of vipers, she couldn't go back to work. This was the first time since her Hogwarts letter came that Tonks had nothing to do. She had always kept up a head of steam, a momentum of studying, planning, working. Now there was nothing to do but wait, hope, gestate. She didn't like it. She preferred movement. Even when she was clumsily smashing into furniture and knocking over stacks of dishes, at least she was moving. This sitting by windows and contemplating, this purgatorial moping – this was much more Remus' style.

Remus.

He had been gone just long enough to make her consider that he might never come back. Not because he didn't want her, but out of mistaken nobility. Again.

This time, there were neither consuming Order missions nor daily Auror paperwork to occupy her mind. So she read books he had left behind. One was about boggarts. One was an epic poem about a mermaid and a grindylow and their ill-fated love affair.

And then, the third day, close to dusk, Remus appeared at the boundary of the protective enchantments. She sat up, tense, like a cat watching a bird. He saw her in the window, and she knew he saw her, and it was too late to close the curtains and pretend she hadn't been moping and reading his books. She folded her arms across her chest (already her breasts felt tender, Merlin that was fast) and went to the door.

She heard him lean against the door, pitching his weight against the wood.

"What form does my Patronus take?" he asked, his mouth very close to the door. He sounded hoarse. Not moon-hoarse. Hoarse like someone who has been yelling, and is unaccustomed to doing so. She wondered what the hell he had gotten up to.

She answered. Then she asked her security question.

"Scotland," he answered, correctly.

She sensed him straightening himself as she turned the brass knob and drew back the door.

She could tell he had been worrying, rubbing his temples, because his hair stuck out at funny angles over his ears on both sides. He had a windswept, fugitive look about him. Her instinct was to throw her arms around him, and maybe vent her anger at him with a kick to the shins, too. But she held back, arms crossed again, standing in the doorframe, which had the effect of raising her about six inches above him.

"I know it will be a long time before you believe anything I say again," he said, mastering himself. "But I'm sorry. I'm so epically sorry, Dora."

She let his words sink in a minute. She noted that he still had his wedding ring on. She didn't know why this struck her as significant, other than the fact that they had been married for such a short time that it was a novel sight anyway.

"You don't have to say anything," he said. "Please don't feel obligated. I'm being... I've been... really terrible. I just wanted to tell you that."

She sighed. "Come inside." 

Remus blinked at her.

"Come on. Don't make me drag you," she said.

"I won't. I'm – thank you."

He stepped over the threshold, looking uncertain whether he was truly allowed to be there, or to be this close to her. She heard her parents coming into the hall, and she was not yet ready to deal with that many layers of this potential reconciliation, not yet ready for the Slytherin-Hufflepuff Joint Inquisition of Dora's Unusual Husband, so she said, "Follow me."

She led him upstairs to her childhood bedroom, which was preserved in all its eighteen-year-old girl splendor – Holyhead Harpies posters, NEWT study aides, a sexy poster of the lead singer of the Weird Sisters, shirtless, with a silver ring through each of his nipples. Tonks shut the door behind Remus and sat on the bed, kicking her long legs, flexing her toes in their striped orange socks. 

Remus stood in the middle of the room, hands folded, like a pilgrim before a sacred relic. She was certain he was thinking again that he was too old for her; she was only underscoring it by bringing him here, where they were surrounded by her colorful souvenirs of adolescence.

She patted the place next to her on the bed. He took the hint and sat down next to her.

"Right. Well. You're not dead, then," she said.

He winced. She felt her own remark rebound off him and back onto her, stinging. But she let it sit there for a moment, the anger, the disappointment. She loved him, but she wasn't going to pretend that he hadn't just abandoned her.

"Where were you?" she asked.

"Mostly trying to shake a Death Eater. Then London."

She flicked the lights on and off with her wand, agitated.

He repaired a loose thread in the quilt on her bed, tapping it with his wand and sending the string scurrying back into the warp and weft.

"Am I allowed to tell you again that I'm sorry?" he asked.

"Don't see why you need my permission. Seems like you do whatever you want," she said.

"I ask because I'm uncertain of the terms of this surrender, or armistice, or whatever you would like this to be. It's your house. The Quaffle is in your hands."

"Fine. You're sorry. What do you plan to do about it?"

"Protect you, if you'll let me. Amuse you, if possible. That's about all I can do."

She flopped back on the bed and exhaled. "Do you still want to be married to me?"

"Yes."

She toyed with her wedding ring, spinning the diamond round and round. This room was making her feel eighteen again – eighteen and petulant. 

"Forgive me if I have trouble believing you right now," she said.

He shut his eyes and nodded. He was fraying, like her quilt, and his loose ends were visible. They were getting closer to the scar tissue now. 

On the poster above Tonks' head, Gwenog Jones dodged a bludger for the umpteenth time. 

"Do you still want to be married to me?" he asked.

"You're making it especially difficult to be."

His mouth became a thin line, a minus symbol in an equation of unknown variables. "I'm – I expect you'll tire of hearing it, Nymphadora, but I am so, so sorry for this. And a thousand other things besides."

She leaned against him, breathing in the smell of woolen traveling cloak and smoky pub. Her stomach felt fluttery, as if she were full of minnows. She yawned and covered her mouth.

"I can leave if you need rest."

She kicked his foot with hers. "Stop that. You're here. Stay here."

"If you want me to sleep somewhere else – "

"I don't." She snaked her fingers around his wrist. "I can't sleep when you're not here."

She tugged his arm. He took the hint and fell back against the mattress beside her. She looked into his eyes, and she could see him chanting in his head, over and over, a silent apology, Byzantine in its utter breadth of regrets. As if he were apologizing for years and years of disappointments, and not just the ones these past few weeks had brought.

"Dora."

"What?"

"I missed you."

"I know."

Sometime afterward, she fell asleep next to him. She woke twice in the night, still torn between anger and need, and knew by the sound of his breathing that he wasn't sleeping at all. Somehow that made her feel even more resentment. But he stayed beside her, and did not move, and did not touch her. 

She remembered the day last year when she woke up in St. Mungo's, and Sirius was dead, and Remus had been sitting beside her bed, looking like the dry, hollow husk of his former self, and even with all that sadness pressing on him, even after he had answered her first, most urgent questions, he had calmly said, “You had some internal bleeding. But they think you can still have children.”

He had only been repeating what the healers had told him. They must have assumed he was her husband, or boyfriend, or emergency contact, although at the time, he was none of those things.

She tried to picture exactly what he had looked like, telling her that. Had he been trying to tell her, underneath that news, that she ought to have children with somebody else, that this was just one more thing he could not do with her? Or had he been voicing his regret, because maybe, if children were not a possibility at all, he could consider being with her? But everything from those days was fuzzy and colored by grief, and she could not remember.

.*.*.

Remus and Tonks lay peaceful and nearly still on her orange sofa while the percussive grinding of her new Weird Sisters album buzzed in their ears like a badly cast Muffliato charm. He had been back for three days. They were still floating in a strange grey area, not quite together again, but not totally without affection, either.

Her nose found the spot behind his ear that she had claimed as her own months ago, the spot where they fit together perfectly. The music faded out and their soft breathing was the only sound.

Remus squeezed her hand. "My turn."

He started to sit up, but she laid her arm across his chest. "You're in no fit state," she said, because the last night's full moon had left him knackered. 

She had slept alone while he went off alone to transform, and she had dreamed of an endless, brutal quest – hunting a white stag, stabbing it with the end of her spear, only to have it rise up again and run away, saying in a human voice, "I will tell them where to find you, you can never be free again."

She propped herself up and summoned the milk crate full of his dog-eared records with her wand. She flipped through them, fighting off a twinge of morning sickness. "How come you've got a David Bowie album in here? Not your usual."

He peered up at her, making that far-away face, the one she was pretty sure he only made when his thoughts were somewhere in the early eighties, among now-deceased friends. Time-traveling, she had taken to calling it. "Somebody lent that to me," he said.

"Sirius?"

He sighed. "Lily Potter."

"Oh."

Tonks had only one, thin childhood memory of Lily Potter – something about a dog in a party hat, and Lily laughing. Tonks had been something like six years old at the time.

"Play it," he said. "She would love that someone is listening."

She flicked her wand at the stereo and levitated the record onto it. Surreal crooning and carelessly cool drumbeats flooded their ears. He tapped his fingers to the music, albeit wearily, and one corner of his mouth hitched up in a smile. She lay down next to him.

"I'm glad you're back," she said.

His hand found hers a second time. "We should talk about names. I wonder what you think of Alastor, for a boy. Or Hope, for a girl."

Her heart clenched.

“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have suggested-”

“It's fine,” said Tonks, although she knew what he meant – that her mentor's name still filled her with fresh sadness when she heard it. He had only died a week and a half ago. That round, all-seeing blue eye was something she would never forget. “It's more that you – you acknowledged...” she continued, hand over her belly. She could not quite finish the thought.

He blinked slowly, like a cat in a patch of sun. Bowie sang on about _golden years, nothing's gonna touch you in these golden years_ , and that was a lie, it was a lie for Lily Potter and it was a lie for all of them, because something had touched them, something had disturbed their universe.

It was hard to explain. She already loved this person, whose sex and eye color and name she did not know. She would defend her, or him, with all the natural gifts and Auror training she possessed. She felt connected to something bigger, something stranger, than her little family of origin and its quirks. She could not force Remus to feel the same way, if he didn't. It was all too soon, and unforeseen. There was still a small part of her that felt whiplash from so many events in such quick succession – falling in love, losing Remus for a year, winning him back, marrying him, losing him again, and losing so much more, too – friends, mentors, plans.

“In a perfect world, would you want to have a child with me?” she asked.

“It's not a perfect world, and I do want to.”

.*.*.

The long rectangle of morning sunlight coming in through the window, which had been stretched across the floor, shortened as the sun rose. Unpacked boxes remained unpacked. Remus and Tonks got through three more albums in their entirety, stopping here and there for quiet conversation. She drifted off to sleep again, and dreamed of nothing at all, and woke to the soft hiss of oil in a pan and the bouquet of pepper and cardamom.

Remus was cooking, wand in hand, directing a pot and a shallow pan on the small, magical stove that was wedged between the window and the cupboard, although he was managing to do this without actually getting up from the sofa.

“That smells like – heaven,” she said. “What is that?”

“Just dal.”

“Where did you learn to cook dal?”

“I travelled a lot. And lentils are inexpensive, so. I know my way around them.”

She blinked at him. “Turn down the heat.”

“Are you feeling ill? I made it mild. I wasn't sure if you were up to anything hot.”

“No,” she said, looking meaningfully at him. “Turn down. The heat. Put it on the back burner.”

He took the hint. “Oh. Oh, Dora, I'm – I'm not really up to much, even though I want -”

“So don't move.”

He let out a sigh that was part chuckle. Then he frowned. “Oh. You – you do want. Dora, I really am not going to be much fun like this.”

She wrested the wand from his hand, and the flames on the stove died down. The floral and savory smells of spices hung in the air. She set down the wand and went to work on the fastenings of both their clothes.

"Yes," he said, when she asked, and she knew that this was an answer to more than one question. "Yes, yes, completely yes."

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was originally written as a couple of other one-shots. I've combined them into one, longer story, and made a few changes to fit it into the R/T fics series here.


End file.
